'The Batman' Should Take Lessons From This Matt Reeves Horror Movie
The Batman is an upcoming film directed by Matt Reeves, staring Robert Pattinson and Zoë Kravitz. The film was started conceptually by Ben Affleck after being cast in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice in 2016. However, in 2017, Affleck stepped down to focus on his acting, and Matt Reeves took over the project. He altered the story to involve a younger Batman, functioning almost as an origin story, with a focus on the notion of Batman as a detective. After all, comics describe him as the world’s greatest detective, but this idea has not been a focus of really any of the recent Batman films.
Among Matt Reeves’ filmography are notable works such as Cloverfield, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, and War for the Planet of the Apes, but what seems to most closely resemble the themes of The Batman, is one of Reeves’ lesser known films, Let Me In. Let Me In is a 2010 thriller film that was a remake of a Swedish film Let the Right One In. Both are based on the 2004 novel also called Let the Right One In by John Ajvide Lindqvist.
The novel tells the story of a young boy who is constantly bullied, who befriends a young girl, appearing to be around his age. It is slowly revealed that she is actually a vampire. The story deals with the young boy, called Oskar in the novel and in the original film (Owen in the American version), becoming more and more aware of the evil that exists in the world. The book deals more with themes of horror and the supernatural, but the two films focus on the relationship between the boy and the vampire. Over the course of the original film, the audience sees the tendencies of a person who could very well become a serial killer present in this young boy. He commits strange and increasingly violent acts out of desire, alongside a very old vampire in the body of a young person who commits very violent acts out of necessity.
The original version, Let the Right One In, was fairly critically acclaimed. It won the Saturn Award for Best International Film, the Empire Award for Best Horror Film, and was nominated for a BAFTA for Best Film Not in the English Language. The screenplay was written by the author of the novel, Lindqvist, and directed by Tomas Alfredson. It came out in 2008, and the remake was out only two years after this. Interestingly, there was the discussion for a remake even before Let the Right One In first premiered.
Reeves’ Let Me In closely follows the plot and sometimes even the shot composition of Let the Right One In. But it cuts out plot points such as how Oskar actually has an okay relationship with both of his parents, the implication as to how the vampire, Eli (Abby in the remake) is actually a castrated boy, and Oskar’s desire to kill. To be fair, all of these points are toned down from what they were in the book. But, in the remake, they are toned down just that much more, or even omitted entirely. Owen’s relationship with his parents is nonexistent, Abby says she is not a girl, but in the sense that she is not human, and Owen’s desire to kill is not really portrayed in any visual way.
The fact that these small details were changed, and a fairly successful film was remade to be otherwise almost exactly the same as the original seems to suggest that American studio executives and distributors liked the premise of the film but felt that these ideas might not be palatable for American audiences. Alfredson was even asked to direct the remake, but he refused. In any case, Reeves’ version functions better as an inspiration for a Batman origin story, as the Swedish original probably would better resemble the origins of a Batman villain.
As it stands, The Batman will be a detective noir film, with Riddler as the main villain (although apparently there may be as many as six villains). The film is supposed to take place about two years into Bruce Wayne’s role as a vigilante in Gotham, and he is a young, idealistic Batman. He wants to make a change in the city, but he isn’t sure how, and this is when the murders in the movie trailers begin to happen. According to Reeves, these murders will reveal even deeper corruptions in Gotham, and ultimately change Batman’s idealist perspective.
Reeves has said to have been interested in the remake of Let the Right One In after having read the book. He said that he was moved by the story and that he related to the main character. He felt in some sense, that it was really the boy’s life that was the horrific part, and he wanted to focus on drawing out ideas of dread in the film. He liked the juxtaposition of the tender moments between the young boy and the vampire, with the intense violence. If The Batman is able to replicate similar ideas, it could be a very engaging interpretation, quite different from previous iterations of Batman.
In Let Me In, a young boy is seeing the evil in the world for the first time and befriending an embodiment of it, while simultaneously being disheartened by it. Whereas the original film and the novel deal more with ideas of this young boy becoming the evil that he meets. The Batman will likely portray similar ideas to Let Me In, in the sense that Batman will be innocent in his own way and become aware of more and more evil. He may even befriend or become part of it in some capacity, as in the trailers Batman has been referred to as the ‘secret friend’ of the perpetrator of the murders who is leaving all of the notes behind. At the end of the trailer, there is even a voice saying to Batman "you're part of this too."
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